Monday, October 08, 2007

Guys who do it well: Westerns

Here is my list of Guys Who Succeed at accurately drawing the Western genre*:

- Dominic Vivona - of Gunplay- Glen Fabry - of the Preacher covers- Steve Purcell - see his awesome Sam & Max Western print in my house- Mike Mignola - from all of one picture- Marcelo Frusin - of Loveless (from what I've seen - haven't read the trades)- Phil Noto - shamefully moved to "suxxors" on account of having really looked at his Jonah Hex work- Luke Ross - from the first of the recent Jonah Hex trades- Steve Dillon - from what I've seen of his Saint of Killers renderings**edit** OF COURSE! Jae Lee - of The Dark Tower series. Beautiful! Can't believe I forgot him on the first time through. Absolutely accurate, even if it is set in a weird Stephen King setting.

People who get some right, some wrong:

- Doug TenNapel - excellent settings and costumes, but the guns in Iron West are double-action revolvers, and one of the shotguns he draws is a rush-job.- Eric Powell - again, good costumes and settings, but the guns that the reverse-zombie guy uses are not cowboy guns, they're double-action revolvers.- Jeff Amano - of The Ballad of Sleeping Beauty. Remember my post on his errors?

I haven't found any of these guys yet. Mark Texeira's work on the Doomtown card set though was pretty bad, though, gun-wise. His guns looked like laser rifles. Apparently, not only did he fail to do any research, he also has never even seen a Western movie.

*For me, that mostly pertains to accurate renderings of the weapons. Clothing I know less about, but I do think that clothing is easier to fake. They had cloth, they had buttons, you can kind of do what you want and it's probably feasible.

2 comments:

Great list, I was hopping you'd round them up (pardon the expression) sooner or later.

I'd be curious how you rate Jeremy Haun (Desperadoes: Banner of Gold), Kazu Kibuishi (Daisy Kutter), and Rob G. (Dead West). These are books I've had for more than a year but quite embarrassingly have never read, along with the first Jonah Hex and Loveless trades. I keep thinking I'm going to read them all at once and write a massive comparison but never get around to it.

I've flipped through Desperadoes and it looked pretty good. Daisy Kutter was a really fun book, and Kazu makes up all his own cool guns. Nothing is period accurate, but it's not supposed to be, so it's great. Rob G. is ok. His art is really scratchy, so it's difficult to discern, but what I can make out looks accurate.